Would you mind hearing me out for a moment?
This didn't happen to me directly, you understand… it's something I heard last autumn from an acquaintance who works in Ueno. There's no way to verify any of it, so whether you believe it is entirely up to you.
This acquaintance — I'll call him K — works at one of the museums in Ueno. He went through a stretch where the overtime never seemed to end, and leaving after eleven at night was nothing unusual for him. The quickest way home took him along the bank of Shinobazu Pond.
It was near the end of October, he said — around half past eleven at night. The air had turned cold, and the dead lotus stalks were standing in rows above the water's surface. All those leaves that had been so lush and green at the height of summer had gone black, lying slumped across the water like something exhausted. That kind of season.
He was walking alone along the promenade beside the pond when, for no reason he could name, the water began to pull at his attention. He didn't know why. But somehow his feet carried him to the very edge.
He looked down into the water.
The streetlights were reflected on the surface, and his own face floated there too, dimly. K wears glasses, and the lenses caught the light in a way that blurred his own features — but even so, he could make out his reflection. His shape, at least.
That was when he noticed.
In the water, just behind the reflection of his own face, there was another face.
A woman's face, he said. Long hair, spreading through the water. But the face wasn't the first thing that struck him.
There was nothing below the neck.
Just a face, drifting up to the surface — pressed close, right up against his reflection, directly behind him.
K said he couldn't bring himself to turn around. It wasn't that his body refused to move. He simply knew — with a certainty he couldn't explain — that turning around would make things considerably worse. People seem to understand these things in moments like that, without knowing how.
So he simply stood there, staring at the water.
The face was staring back.
Their eyes met. In the water. He was certain of it.
He couldn't say how long it lasted. Ten seconds, perhaps. A minute. At some point he became aware that his legs were moving on their own, and he was running. He didn't look back. He said that several times — that he didn't look back.
Afterwards, K did a little research. Shinobazu Pond, it turns out, has been known since the Edo period as a place where people came to drown themselves; the water weeds grow so thick and deep that bodies, once they sink, are said never to rise again. There is also a story — more than a story — about the night in March of 1945, when incendiary bombs fell on Tokyo and people with nowhere left to run crowded to the banks of that pond, and many of them never left.
But that isn't the part that stayed with me.
It was the last thing K said.
"The thing is — she was smiling. Not angry, not sorrowful. Just smiling. The way something smiles when it has been waiting at the bottom of the water for a very long time."
After that, K changed his route home.
But she still appears in his dreams sometimes, he told me.
In the dreams, he always turns around — and every time, there is no one there.
Only the surface of the pond.
And in the water, his own face looking back at him. Just the one.
